


see the line where the sky meets the sea (it calls me)

by orpheus_under_starlight



Series: how far i'll go [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Canon Divergent, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Rey and Ben's Excellent Adventure, Tatooine, but is the past ever truly dead?, enemies to frenemies, if you have to, kill it, let the past die, that's the only way to become what you were meant to be
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-18 00:18:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13088463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orpheus_under_starlight/pseuds/orpheus_under_starlight
Summary: “Luke, I think I’ll need to extend my trip.”“I thought this might happen. How much more time do you need?”A long silence.“…I’m not sure.”Luke breathes out. He looks tired, all of a sudden. Nearly ancient. “May the Force be with you, Rey. Take care of him.”Or: Kylo and Rey, drifting in a galaxy where the First Order and the Resistance are at a stalemate.





	see the line where the sky meets the sea (it calls me)

“This isn’t what I asked for,” Rey says, staring dumbly at the assortment of tiny baked goods Kylo has placed into her hands. When she had sent him off to the small trading outpost while she double-checked the ship’s undergirding, she hadn’t expected him to do anything but balefully retrieve what she’d asked him to look for. He’s still put out about her continued refusal to allow him to pilot.

Kylo looks miffed. “If you don’t want them,” he starts, but quicker than a flash, Rey has tucked the package into the pouch at her hip. He blinks. “…Right.”

“I’m not displeased,” Rey qualifies, turning back and surveying the underside of their ship so he can’t see the small smile on her face. She’d never done it, but on Jakku, bringing your enemy portions qualified as a—peace offering, of sorts. “We’re just in urgent need of a hydrospanner.”

He peers over her shoulder. The gentle sunlight of Sylvana turns his hair a shade of the deepest brown, the only time it can really be seen as anything other than black. “Ah—the lifters. How is this ship not stocked with a hydrospanner?”

“Excellent question,” she mumbles, not quite willing to admit that she’d been having a mock-duel with BB-8 prior to leaving the base and had quite forgotten it in all the hubbub of takeoff. The last memo she’d received had said that the Resistance was moving; where she isn’t sure, but in their latest call Leia had said it was an old Rebel routine, one they’d put back into place when the First Order’s activities ground to a screeching halt for reasons nobody was quite sure of.

 _Our spies say Kylo Ren has vanished,_ Leia had told her, the line of her shoulders strong and proud like the son that had been napping in the background during Rey’s call. Her chin was lifted high. And she had smiled, eyes burning bright and fierce even in hologram form. Rey had understood in that moment that whether she was the princess of a dead planet or no, Leia Organa would always be royalty. _Naturally, it’d be remiss of us not to take this time to regroup and coordinate with our allies. We were very close to being discovered, after all. I’m glad to see you’re doing just fine—you and your companion._  She’d paused. _May the Force be with you, Rey of Jakku._

She had provided no projected destination. With the pulsing bracelet Rey keeps hidden under her wrist wraps, she doesn’t need one.

-

“You’ve been dreaming.”

His eyes flicker to the side. “Yes,” he allows.

“Did you ever go a night without dreaming?” _When you were younger,_ she thinks but doesn’t say.

Silence.

“Jakku was too hot for anything but daydreams.”

“I know.”

-

Rey still eats like a vulture.

Kylo politely keeps his attention on his own meal, consuming the soup in slow, conservative sips, all the etiquette of his childhood demanding that he not be an embarrassment to his station like an annoying voice playing on repeat in the back of his head. 3PO had been the one to—no. He understands why the girl across from him gobbles down her food like it could be taken from her at any moment, of course. She hadn’t had any choice. It was survival or starvation, and she had to survive until her family came back.

Because they would be coming back. At any moment. She had to be ready.

Kylo swallows hard. His spoon scrapes against the bottom of the bowl; both he and Rey pause, looking at it in surprise. Rey snorts at him and goes back to the Ithorian hotpot he’d spotted on the menu and decided against by virtue of his general allergy to any kind of mushroom, regardless of galactic origin. This close to each other, he can see the remnants of Jakku in her jawline, in her skin.

She glances up, tenses, leans over her food a little more. Like he’d steal it from her. “What?”

“Nothing,” Kylo says. He raises an eyebrow at her suspicion. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve eaten.”

Rey stares at him for a little while longer. He could look into her eyes all day. Her lips thin. “...Mind your own business.”

“You think I’m _too much?_ _”_ he asks, honestly offended at the murky thought that leaps to the surface of her thoughts—something along the lines of how his bulk must affect his metabolism—and she coughs on an unidentifiable piece of fish, tears coming to her eyes as she tries to dislodge it from her throat. He gawks as she awkwardly maneuvers an arm behind her own back and pounds half on her side; she successfully recovers herself and wipes the involuntary tears away from her eyes, glaring at him.

“You could’ve _helped,”_ she says, accusatory.

“You think I’m too much,” he replies, in much the same tone.

He can feel the urge to laugh start from somewhere deep within her chest, but she admirably clamps down on it and makes her face even and blank as stone. “What makes you think that?”

“You thought it, right before—that,” he says, gesturing helplessly at her throat. Malfunctioning or not, it’s a very nice throat.

She rolls her eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You’re not denying it.”

Rey sets her utensils down and glares at him. “For your information, I was thinking about your muscles, not—you being too much. What does that even mean? There's not... that's not a thing. You're not  _too much._ You  _are_ ridiculous.”

“Oh.” Kylo blinks, digesting this. “Wait—”

“—We’d getter bet back to the ship,” Rey says hurriedly, going for the spiciest part of her hotpot. Through a mouthful of candy-red noodles, she speaks. “It gets cold at night here.”

 _Getter bet?_ he thinks, staring at her, wondering if he’d really just heard that or if he’d imagined it in some desperate flight of fancy. The way her cheeks are flushed is either that or the spice, and every mishap in his miserable, cosmically ironic life points to the fact that he is not exactly a lucky man.

-

At night:

“There was a cave, on the island. I needed to go to it. There was something I needed to see.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t,” she agrees.

He doesn’t ask. Instead: “I never dreamed of the island.”

“Oh?”

His eyes burn into her. She could watch him all day, like this, sitting next to her on a chilly flight bunk. “Only you.”

-

Kylo looms over her turned back, glaring at the flight navicomputer. “Tatooine?”

Rey hums.

“There’s nothing on Tatooine,” he says, oddly tense. She can feel the way his entire body is tight, strung like a wire, adrenaline pulsing in his veins—what is it about this planet that makes him so anxious? “Nothing good, anyways. If there’s a bright center of the universe—”

 _“—Jakku_ is the farthest from it,” Rey cuts in, turning her head ever-so-slightly, pinning him in place with a look. He’s undeterred.

“I don’t want to go to Tatooine,” he informs her.

Rey turns back to the flight calculations. “My apologies. Let me just ignore the Force’s call, then,” she says, rolling her eyes, but Kylo puts a hand on her shoulder. She pauses. It’s gentle—it always is, the rare times he ventures to touch her. The last thing he wants is to hurt her. She can _feel_ it. Him, well, he can feel the shiver that slides down her spine at how his hand engulfs her shoulder.

“Rey,” he says. Low again, like that night on Sholon, but he’s—imploring. There’s more than just sand here, at least for him.

She leans her head back against the headrest. Her hair brushes against his chest. “I’m finding my place in all this,” she reminds him. 

Something bitter floods his mouth, spills over into hers. “By following half-cocked presuppositions?”

“If I recall,” she says sharply, _“you_ were the one who was hoping _I_ would have a plan. Here’s the plan.”

He pulls away from her and shuffles over to the co-pilot’s seat, at once piqued and morose. The slump into the chair is _so_ dramatic that Rey rolls her eyes again and busies herself checking the flight controls, even though all the needed calculations have been inputted and she doesn’t really need to do anything else. His hair looks alarmingly soft, scattered about his face like that, and she doesn’t trust herself not to reach out and bury her fingers in it. She can’t give him that right now.

She hadn’t mentioned it to Luke or Leia, but there’d been something in his eyes, that morning he was shaking in her arms and denying the truth she was giving to him. Something that had sparked a wild, blazing, half-mad hope in her, one she’d done her best to tamp down on lest he sense it, but—

Rey lightly bites the back of her lip to bring herself back to the present. Kylo twitches, a full-bodied thing, and a warm rush goes through her. She feels herself flush and prays it doesn’t creep above her neckline. “Stop snooping,” she commands, and the look he gives her isn’t even repentant.

 _Haku a hotshuh,_ she gripes to herself. _Koochoo. Dopa-maskey stoopa sleemo—_

“You’re not very inventive when it comes to insults,” he murmurs, looking straight ahead, scrunched up ridiculously in his seat with his collar riding halfway up his face, and it’s only the tiny smile peeking out over the corner of that dark uniform that prevents her from challenging him to a fight right then and there.

Now he’s just being petty. She won't give him the satisfaction of evoking her ire.

"Darling," he adds. He's  _taunting_ her.

"Go be a useful crew member and do something else," she snaps, then shuts her mouth so hard her teeth clash against each other painfully. Kylo doesn't say anything else, but his smugness radiates in the space between them.

In the ensuing silence, the shape of his satisfaction morphs into something like loss. She pretends not to notice the way he glances at her or the breath he draws in or the words that die in his throat at her lack of acknowledgment. He stands abruptly, a tall, dark pillar at the corner of her field of vision, a storm like R'iia's gathering in his brow.

Rey only glances at his back when he sweeps out of the cockpit. His cape flutters behind him, drifting on some unseen celestial wind, his mind spiraling further and further from their connection even though there's hardly any room on the ship for them to ignore each other.

 _That went well,_ she thinks, lips thinning.

 


End file.
